Automatic Phrase Continuation from Guitar and Bass guitar Melodies

1 The Faculty of Engineering and Science, Aalborg University, VBN2 Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, The Faculty of Engineering and Science, Aalborg University, VBN3 Sound & Music Computing, The Faculty of Engineering and Science, Aalborg University, VBN4 Audio Analysis Lab, The Faculty of Engineering and Science, Aalborg University, VBN5 City University London6 Universitat Pompeu Fabra7 City University London8 Universitat Pompeu Fabra

DOI:

10.1162/COMJ_a_00184

Abstract:

A framework is proposed for generating interesting, and musically similar variations of a givenmonophonicmelody. The focus is on rock/pop guitar and bass-guitarmelodies with the aim of eventual extensions to other instruments and musical styles. It is demonstrated here how learning musical style from segmented audio data can be formulated as an unsupervised learning problem to generate a symbolic representation. A melody is first segmented into a sequence of notes using onset detection and pitch estimation. A set of hierarchical, coarse-to-fine symbolic representations of the melody is generated by clustering pitch values at multiple similarity thresholds. The Variance Ratio Criterion is then used to select the appropriate clustering levels in the hierarchy. Note onsets are aligned with beats, considering the estimated meter of the melody, to create a sequence of symbols that represent the rhythm in terms of onsets/rests and the metrical locations of their occurrence. A joint representation based on the cross-product of the pitch cluster indices and metrical locations is used to train the prediction model - the variable-length Markov chain. The melodies generated by the model were evaluated through a questionnaire by a group of experts, and received an overall positive response.